Many experts will have you believe the \u201cGreat Recession\u201d officially ended in June of 2009.\u00a0 June of 2009?\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 Explain that one to the thousands of people that have not worked in 2 years or to those that have had to take a significant pay cut or change professions because their skill set is no longer in demand.\u00a0 No, things have remained difficult for many since June of 2009.\u00a0 A great number of people have exhausted their unemployment benefits and many are still experiencing layoffs.\u00a0 However, there is light at the end of the tunnel\u2026I just always preferred hearing the bad news before the good news.<\/p>\n
An excellent barometer for the employment market has always been the staffing industry.\u00a0 Financial experts often look to our industry to guide them with decisions and predictions.\u00a0 Typically, when the economy begins to experience a downturn, staffing companies will see it first.\u00a0 Companies will start by eliminating temporary personnel and slow down or put a freeze on new hires.\u00a0 Layoffs often follow these initial steps.\u00a0 Conversely, as the economy starts to rebound, staffing companies will experience a pickup in business activity prior to many other industries.\u00a0 As companies begin to build confidence in the demand for their product or service, they often reach out to staffing companies to ease back into the hiring process.\u00a0 Business is picking up but they do not want to make a full-time commitment yet to new hires.\u00a0 During these times companies like the flexibility that comes with working with a staffing firm.\u00a0 Hiring temporary employees is a common practice when ramping up the workforce.<\/p>\n
The demand for our services started to wane in the second half of 2008 and continued to decline through most of 2009.\u00a0 It was not until 2010 that we started to see some good signs. Pockets of activity were starting to appear and interview activity was increasing.\u00a0\u00a0 The challenge was the consistency of new orders from our clients.\u00a0 The recovery was happening, but it was in the form of steps\u2026a flurry of activity followed by a lull of new orders, followed by good activity, etc.\u00a0 The majority of this demand was for our temporary and temp to hire staffing services with a slight uptick in direct hire.\u00a0 This pattern continued throughout 2010.\u00a0 It was obviously a better year than 2009 but it was still a struggle at times.<\/p>\n
This brings us to 2011 and the report is\u2026so far so good!\u00a0 We, along with the staffing industry as a whole, have experienced strong and consistent growth in the first half of the year.\u00a0 Additionally, more assignments are for longer periods and more of our temporary employees are transitioning to our client\u2019s payrolls.\u00a0 Direct hire orders are up and the time frame from first interview to hire has shortened.\u00a0 These are clearly all good signs that we are moving in the right direction, but we still have a ways to go.\u00a0 One interesting trend we are seeing is the increase in requests for part-time temporaries.\u00a0 This is a sign that there is still a lot of caution out there when adding personnel decisions are being made.\u00a0 We will still experience some lulls or dips this year but I believe they will be short lived.\u00a0 It may be slow, but things ARE changing for the better.\u00a0 I wish everyone continued success in 2011 and beyond!<\/p>\n
Sincerely,<\/p>\n
Bill Emerson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Staffing Company\u2019s View of the Job Market Many experts will have you believe the \u201cGreat Recession\u201d officially ended in June of 2009.\u00a0 June of 2009?\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 Explain that one to the thousands of people that have not worked in 2 years or to those that have had to take a significant pay cut or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presidents-corner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emersongroupinc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}